Anna Girling
Early Career Teaching and Research Fellow in Twentieth-Century Literature
- English Literature
- School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures
Contact details
- Email: Anna.Girling@ed.ac.uk
Address
- Street
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Room 2.22
50 George Square - City
- Post code
Availability
Office hours (semester 2, 2023-2024): Tuesdays, 11 am - 12 noon
Background
I joined Edinburgh as an Early Career Teaching and Research Fellow in Twentieth-Century English and American Literature in 2023 and have previously taught at Edinburgh, Edinburgh Napier University, and York University in Toronto.
I completed my PhD at Edinburgh (on Edith Wharton, gay male literature, and literary decadence) in 2022. I also have an MA in English and Modern History from the University of St. Andrews and an MA in English Literature from York University in Toronto.
In 2022-2023 I was an Early Career Fellow at the Institute for English Studies (School of Advanced Study, University of London) and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Brighton. I am currently an Affiliate at Edinburgh's Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and am a Member-at-Large on the Executive Board of the Edith Wharton Society (https://edithwhartonsociety.wordpress.com). I have previously also held an Eccles Centre Fellowship at the British Library.
Undergraduate teaching
2023-2024:
Cities of Words: Twentieth-Century Urban American Writing
Edinburgh in Fiction/Fiction in Edinburgh
Literary Studies 1A
The American Novel, 1920-1960
The American Novel, 1970-2010
Areas of interest for supervision
Please note that I am not able to supervise PhD students. If you are interested in studying for a PhD in English at Edinburgh, you can learn more about the application process here: https://www.ed.ac.uk/literatures-languages-cultures/english-literature/postgraduate/phd/writing-a-research-proposal-for-the-phd-in-english
Research summary
My work to date has centred on the literary representation and theorisation of community, and the relationship between politics, gender, and literary form, in writing from across the twentieth century. My wider research and teaching interests include: literary decadence, aestheticism, cosmopolitanism, and modernism; anti-colonial literature and postcolonialism; women’s writing; middlebrow literature and crime writing; book and publishing history; periodical studies; gender, sexuality, camp, and queer studies; and many other aspects of twentieth-century prose writing from and about the UK, Europe, US, and Caribbean.
My PhD thesis, 'Edith Wharton and queer history at the fin de siècle', which I am currently revising for publication, places the American writer Edith Wharton in the context of European decadent literature, in particular a gay male literary tradition, and of the particular moment in the history of sexuality at which she was writing. I approach Wharton as a modernist scholar as well as an Americanist, and have used recent work in queer theory, decadent, and modernist studies, and cosmopolitanism – in conjunction with a rigorous historical contextualisation of her work – to reassess her career.
My current research includes work on the writer, publisher, editor, and activist, Nancy Cunard, and in particular her anti-colonial and anti-fascist writings from the 1930s.
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'Grab that crab: Twenty years since the end of the Two Fat Ladies'. Times Literary Supplement, 22 November 2019: 10-11. (https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/grab-that-crab/)
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‘More than a muse: Reassessing the legacy of Nancy Cunard.’ (https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/more-than-a-muse-nancy-cunard/) Commentary section, Times Literary Supplement, 11 January 2019: 14-16.
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‘A Lost Night: A newly discovered story by Nancy Cunard’ (ed.). (https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/a-lost-night-cunard-story/) Times Literary Supplement, 11 January 2019: 16.
- 'Ramkrishna Mukherjee and Frank Girling: Marxist Anthropology and McCarthyism in the 1950s'. Journal of the Asiatic Society: Papers in Honour of Professor Ramkrishna Mukherjee (2017): 13-30.
- '“Comedy of Errors”: The Correspondence between Edith Wharton and John Murray in the National Library of Scotland.' (http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/editwharrevi.32.1-2.0061) Edith Wharton Review 32:1-2 (2016): 61-79.
- ‘Michael Arlen,’ ‘Nella Larsen.’ The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism (https://www.rem.routledge.com/) (Ed. Stephen Ross). (2016).
- '"Agrope Among Alien Forces": Alchemical Transformations and Capitalist Transactions in Edith Wharton's The Touchstone'. (http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/editwharrevi.31.1-2.0074) Edith Wharton Review 31:1-2 (2015): 74-87. (winner of the Edith Wharton Society Beginning Scholar Prize).
- 'The touch of a vanished hand – Edith Wharton's fraught relationship with John Murray.' (http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/the-touch-of-a-vanished-hand/) Commentary section, Times Literary Supplement, 26 June 2015: 13-15.
Reviews
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'He could have done anything: the failed poetic and critical career of Richard Aldington'. Review of Richard Aldington, Volume One: Poet, soldier and lover and Richard Aldington, Volume Two: Novelist, biographer and exile, by Vivien Whelton, Times Literary Supplement, 20 March 2020: 12-13. (https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/richard-aldington-vivien-whelpton-review-anna-girling/)
- Review of Modernism, Fashion and Interwar Women Writers, by Vike Plock, Edith Wharton Review 35:2 (2019): 154-159. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/editwharrevi.35.2.0154)
- ‘Problematic Faves’. Review of The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature, edited by Ulrika Maude and Mark Nixon, and Conservative Modernists: Literature and Tory Politics in Britain, 1900–1920, by Christos Hadjiyiannis, Times Literary Supplement, 6 September 2019: 17-18. (https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/problematic-faves/)
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‘Feminize Your Archives!’ Review of Women in the Archives (conference), The Modernist Review, 1:1 (October 2018). (https://modernistreviewcouk.wordpress.com/2018/10/10/conference-review-feminize-your-archives-women-in-the-archives/)
- Review of Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism, edited by Meredith Goldsmith and Emily Orlando, Edith Wharton Review, 33:2 (2017): 393-398. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.5325/editwharrevi.33.2.0393.pdf)
I also occasionally write fiction reviews for the Times Literary Supplement (https://www.the-tls.co.uk/authors/anna-girling/).
I wrote this blog post (https://sgsahblog.com/2020/06/09/unfunded/) for the Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities in the summer of 2020 about my experience of being an un-funded PhD student.